Is the 50-50-ish Race Driving you Crazy? You are not alone
Polling and Politics in the Final Days of the Biden-Harris War: A Conversation with Braden Bruni and Nate Silver
Bret Stephens: I like voting on Election Day. The other day a friend of mine went to vote in the museum and said the line was hours long. Mostly women. I think a big victory is predicted for Kamala Harris in Manhattan.
What will most likely be a huge turnout in New York will not affect the outcome, since everyone on both sides knew that this wasn’t a state they needed to campaign in. But it would be nice if the margin for Kamala Harris in Donald Trump’s hometown was a super blowout.
My sense is that Trump will win. It feels like he has the momentum, which is hard to measure but matters, especially in the final days of a campaign. He has the better photo ops. And surveys show only 28 percent of Americans think America is on the right track, which historically means the incumbent party loses. And, as I’ve been saying here, I also think that Trump represents control, and people feel that too many things have spun out of control during the full arc of the Biden-Harris years: migration, prices, rent, financing costs, urban safety, overseas wars.
Frank Bruni, a contributing Opinion writer, hosted a written online conversation on Friday, Nov. 1, with Kristen Soltis Anderson, a contributing Opinion writer and Republican pollster, and Nate Silver, the author of “On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything” and the newsletter Silver Bulletin, to discuss polling and politics in the final days of the race between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Frank Bruni: Kristen, Nate, thank you for joining me. It seems that no one knows anything ahead of election day. Democrats fret — that’s their nature. Republicans mimic their idol. And you two? I want to check on your gut now, you wrote a widely read guest essay for us, and it’suguring a victory for Donald Trump. Guts change. Have yours?
A person named Nathan Silver. The entire point of the article was that I don’t believe my gut is worth anything in this case. Many people interpreted it differently, as though I was revealing my super-duper secret real prediction. I was sure that that would happen. But your gut feeling a week before the election will mostly be an emotional response or picking up on the vibes through osmosis — Republicans are invariably more confident so that seeps through — and I don’t think either of those things will help you make a better prediction.
Kristen Soltis Anderson: Whenever people ask me who I think will win, and I steadfastly refuse to tell them — because I don’t feel confident we know how this is going to go given the available data — people get very frustrated. It is understandable, we all want certainty. People want to mentally or emotionally prepare for an outcome. They do not like surprises. You should prepare for a lot of outcomes, mentally and emotionally.
